Author Archives: Klaus Ottmann

Summer List

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Maurice Prendergast, On the Beach, c. 1907-1909. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 14 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1926.

Last week’s glorious weather inspired me to put together a shortlist of things to read, hear, or see this summer:

To the End of the Land, David Grossman’s haunting novel of love and magical thinking that centers on the emotional struggle of an Israeli mother hiking through the mountainous terrain of Galilee with her son’s estranged father in an ingenuous attempt to keep their son alive while he is on a military offensive in Lebanon by telling his father stories about him.

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. A brilliant first novel of old-world beauty and magic by a surprisingly mature 25-year old, it consists of a series of interwoven stories that take place in a fictional Balkan country and feature, among many other remarkable and wondrous characters, a mute woman who befriends a tiger that has escaped from the zoo and a deathless man who has been condemned to live forever.

Don’t kill the birthday girl! by Washington-based poet and longtime friend of The Phillips Collection, Sandra Beasley. A touching and enlightening memoir of an “Allergy Girl” about learning to live with severe food allergies.

STRATA, the stirring recording of the “Symphony No. 6” by the Estonian contemporary composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, whose music was performed last February as part of the Phillips’s Leading European Composers series (ECM; Nordic Symphonic Orchestra; Anu Tali, conductor).

Rooms with a View at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on view through July 4), one of the most beautiful exhibitions I have seen in a very long time, exquisitely curated by Sabine Rewald, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Met.

Game of Thrones, a new HBO series based on the epic fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, about the violent struggle for control over the Seven Kingdoms of the northern realm under the background of the arrival of a long winter, which in this world can last several lifetimes and may bring with it unimaginable horrors. In short, the perfect entertainment while we endure the effects of global warming this summer.

Farewell to an icon of my youth

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When I was growing up in Germany in the sixties, the word Playboy did not provoke images of naked women on glossy magazine pages or long-legged waitresses wearing skimpy bunny suits. It evoked images of Saint-Tropez, racing cars, and Brigitte Bardot. The playboy was Gunter Sachs, the heir of one of Germany’s biggest automobile suppliers, Fichtel & Sachs, who not only was rumored to have been romantically linked to Queen Soraya of Iran, but for three years was married to the most beautiful woman alive, the French actress Brigitte Bardot. He wed Bardot in Las Vegas in 1966 after having courted her by dropping hundreds of roses from his helicopter over her villa on the French Riviera. Sachs was not only the Playboy par excellence but a serious art collector, documentary filmmaker, and fine art photographer. Among the artists in his collection were Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. In 1972 Sachs opened a contemporary art gallery in Hamburg with an exhibition of works by Andy Warhol. From 1967 to 1975 he was co-president of “Modern Art Museum München,” an association that pursued the formation of a museum of modern art in Munich and organized exhibitions of contemporary artists (Georg Baselitz, Christo, Cy Twombly, and Roy Lichtenstein among them) at the Villa Stuck. In 1976 he received the prestigious Leica award for his own photographic work, and in 2008 the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig presented a major survey of Sachs’s work and life, entitled Gunter Sachs – Die Kunst ist weiblich (Gunter Sachs – Art is Female).

Gunter Sachs died by his own hand on May 7 at his residence in Gstaad, Switzerland.

Who owns the rights to documentations of performance art?

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As a curator specializing in contemporary art from the 1960s to the present, with a particular interest in performative works by such artists as James Lee Byars and Yves Klein, I was alarmed by a recent court ruling on the issue of who owns the copyright to the photographic documentation of artistic performances. A German court ruled in favor of Eva Beuys, the widow of the artist Joseph Beuys, who claims that she controls the rights to photographs taken during Beuys’s 1964 performance Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp ist überbewertet (The silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated). The photographs were taken by the late Manfred Tischer who was granted permission to document the performance by Beuys at the time, but apparently was not authorized explicitly to publish or exhibit them. When the German museum Schloss Moyland, which houses an extensive collection and archive of Beuys’s works, decided to exhibit 19 of Tischer’s photographs, the artist’s widow sued the museum of copyright infringement with the help of the German copyright society, VG Bild-Kunst. Continue reading →